Students Are Already Workers

32 Pages·2007·0.14 MB·English

by  Andrew Katz

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Students Are Already Workers
I know that I haven’t updated in about two and a half weeks, but I
have an excuse. UPS is just a tiring job. You see, before, I had an
extra 31hours to play games, draw things, compose music ... do
homework. But now, 31+ hours of my life is devoted to UPS.
I hate working there. But I need the money for college, so I
don’t have the option of quitting. My job at UPS is a loader. I
check the zip codes on the box, I scan them into the database, and
then I load them into the truck, making a brick wall out of boxes.
—“Kody” (pseud.), high-school blogger in a
UPS “school-to-work” program, 2005
The alarm sounds at 2:00 am. Together with half a dozen
of her colleagues, the workday has begun for Prof. Susan Erdmann, a
tenure-track assistant professor of English at Jefferson Community Col-
lege in Louisville, Kentucky. She rises carefully to avoid waking her in-
fant son and husband, who commutes forty miles each way to his own
tenure-track community college job in the neighboring rural county.
She makes coffee, showers, dresses for work. With their combined in-
come of around $60,000 and substantial education debt, they have a
thirty-year mortgage on a tiny home of about 1,000 square feet: galley
kitchen, dining alcove, one bedroom for them and another for their two
sons to share. The front door opens onto a “living room” of a hundred
square feet; entering or leaving the house means passing in between the
couch and television. They feel fortunate to be able to afford any mort-
gage at all in this historically Catholic neighborhood that was originally
populated by Louisville factory workers. It is winter; the sun will not
rise for hours. She drives to the airport. Overhead, air-freight 747s bar-
rel into the sky, about one plane every minute or so. Surrounded by
the empty school buildings, boarded storefronts, and dilapidated under-
class homes of south-central Louisville, the jets launch in post-midnight
125
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salvos. Their engines lack the sophisticated noise-abatement technology
required of air traffic in middle-class communities. Every twelve or eigh-
teen months, the city agrees to buy a handful of the valueless residences
within earshot.1
Turning into the airport complex, Susan never comes near the shut-
tered passenger terminals. She follows a four-lane private roadway to-
ward the rising jets. After parking, a shuttle bus weaves among blind-
ingly lit aircraft hangars and drops her by the immense corrugated sort-
ing facility that is the United Parcel Service main air hub, where she will
begin her faculty duties at 3:00am, greeting UPS’s undergraduate work-
force directly as they come off the sort. “You would have a sense that
you were there, lifting packages,” Erdmann recalls. “They would come
off sweaty, and hot, directly off the line into the class. It was very imme-
diate, and sort of awkward. They’d had no moment of downtime. They
hadn’t had their cigarette. They had no time to pull themselves together
as student-person rather than package-thrower.” Unlike her students,
Susan and other faculty teaching and advising at the hub are not issued
a plastic ID card and door pass. She waits on the windy tarmac for one
of her students or colleagues to hear her knocking at the door. Inside,
the noise of the sorting facility is, literally, deafening: the shouts, forklift
alarms, whistles, and rumble of the sorting machinery actually drown
out the noise of the jets rising overhead. “Teaching in the hub was hor-
rible,” recalled one of Erdmann’s colleagues. “Being in the hub was just
hell. I’d work at McDonald’s before I’d teach there again. The noise
level was just incredible. The classroom was just as noisy as if it didn’t
have any walls.” In addition to the sorting machinery, UPS floor su-
pervisors were constantly “screaming, yelling back and forth, ‘Get this
done, get that done, where’s so and so.’”
Susan is just one of a dozen faculty arriving at the hub after mid-
night. Some are colleagues from Jefferson Community College and the
associated technical institution; others are from the University of Louis-
ville. Their task tonight is to provide on-site advising and registration
for some of the nearly 6,000 undergraduate students working for UPS
at this facility. About 3,000of those students work a midnight shift that
ends at UPS’s convenience—typically 3:00 or 4:00 am, although the
shift is longer during the holiday and other peak shipping seasons.
Nearly all of the third-shift workers are undergraduate students who
have signed employment contracts with something called the “Metro-
politan College.” The name is misleading, since it’s not a college at all.
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An “enterprise” partnership between UPS, the city of Louisville, and
the campuses that employ Susan and her colleagues, Metropolitan Col-
lege is, in fact, little more than a labor contractor. Supported by public
funds, this “college” offers no degrees and does no educating. Its sole
function is to entice students to sign contracts that commit them to pro-
vide cheap labor in exchange for education benefits at the partner insti-
tutions.2 The arrangement has provided UPS with over 10,000 ultra-
low-cost student workers since 1997, the same year that the Teamsters
launched a crippling strike against the carrier. The Louisville arrange-
ment is the vanguard of UPS’s efforts to convert its part-time payroll, as
far as possible, to a “financial aid” package for student workers in part-
nership with campuses near its sorting and loading facilities. Other low-
wage Louisville employers, such as Norton and ResCare have joined on
a trial basis.
As a result of carefully planned corporate strategy, between 1997and
2003, UPS hired undergraduate students to staff more than half of its
130,000 part-time positions (Hammers). Students are currently the ma-
jority of all part-timers, and the overwhelming majority on the least
desirable shifts. Part of UPS’s strategy is that only some student employ-
ees receive education benefits. By reserving the education benefits of its
“earn and learn” programs to workers who are willing to work unde-
sirable hours, UPS has over the past decade recruited approximately
50,000 part-time workers to its least desirable shifts without raising the
pay (in fact, while pushing them to work harder for continually lower
pay against inflation) (“Earn and Learn Factsheet”). The largest benefit
promises are reserved for students who think they can handle working
after midnight every night of the school week.
Between 1998 and 2005, UPS claims to have “assisted” 10,000 stu-
dents through the Metropolitan College arrangement (Conway). Of the
7,500 part-time employees at UPS’s Louisville hub in May 2006, some
were welfare-to-work recipients picked up in company buses from the
city and even surrounding rural counties. A few hundred were Louis-
ville-area high school students in school-to-work programs. Three-quar-
ters of the part-timers—5,600—were college students (Howington).
More than half of the students—about 3,000—were enrolled in Metro-
politan College, which, with few exceptions, accepts only those willing
to work the night shift. Metropolitan College “enrollment” and “re-
cruitment” activities are entirely driven by UPS’s staffing needs. Ditto
for scheduling: all of the benefits enjoyed by Metro College students are
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contingent on showing up at the facility every weeknight of the school
year at midnight and performing physically strenuous labor for as long
as they are needed.
The consequences of night-shift work are well documented, and the
preponderance of available evidence suggests markedly negative effects
for the Louisville students. Every instructor to whom I spoke reported
excessive fatigue and absenteeism (due to fatigue, but also an extraordi-
narily high physical injury rate: “They all got hurt,” Erdmann reports).
Students who signed employment contracts with Metro College showed
substantial failure to persist academically. “I would lose students mid-
term, or they would never complete final assignments,” Erdmann said.
“They would just stop coming at some point.” Erdmann served as chair
of a faculty committee that attempted to improve the academic success
of students employed by UPS at her institution. The group scheduled
special UPS-only sections between 5:00 and 11:00 pm, both on campus
and at the hub, and began the ritual of 3:00 am advising. Since nearly
all of the faculty involved taught and served on committees five days a
week, their efforts to keep students from dropping out by teaching eve-
nings and advising before dawn resulted in a bizarre twenty-four-hour
cycle of work for themselves. The institutions even experimented with
ending the fall semester before Thanksgiving for the thousands of UPS
employees, in order to keep their finals from conflicting with the holi-
day shipping rush (and the one season a year when the students could
be assured of a shift lasting longer than four hours). Even in the spe-
cially scheduled classes and shortened terms, Erdmann recalls classes
with dropout rates of 30 to 40 percent. “It was most definitely worse
for those with children,” she concluded:
It was a disaster for those with children. Students who had family obli-
gations tended to do poorly. When you had younger, more traditional
age students with a very clear and limited goal—and they were often
men—if they had a limited goal, such as “I am going to get Microsoft
certified,” and if they were healthy and young, and physically active,
those individuals might be okay.
Whenever you had people with children—you know, people who
can’t sleep all day, they would get tremendously stressed out. I feel like
very few of them actually did well with the program, the ones with
family.
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Pressed to offer instances of individual students who undisputably bene-
fited from the program, Erdmann described just two individuals, both
at the extreme margins of economic and social life. One was a single
mother who worked multiple jobs and saved some of her wages toward
adownpaymentonaresidentialtrailer,thusescapinganabusivedomes-
tic life. The other was a young man coping with severe mental illness.
Rather than relieving economic pressure, Metropolitan College ap-
pears to have increased the economic distress of the majority of partici-
pants. According to the company’s own fact sheet, those student work-
ers who give up five nights’ sleep are typically paid for just fifteen to
twenty hours a week. Since the wage ranges from just $8.50 at the start
to no more than $9.50 for the majority of the most experienced, this
can mean net pay below $100 in a week, and averaging out to a little
over $120. The rate of pay bears emphasizing: because the students
must report five nights a week and are commonly let go after just three
hours each night, their take-home pay for sleep deprivation and physi-
cally hazardous toil will commonly be less than $25 per shift.
In fact, most UPS part-timers earn little more than $6,000 in a year.
Most have at least one other job, because their typical earnings from
UPS in 2006–2007 would generally have covered little more than the
worker’s car payment, insurance, gasoline, and other transportation-
related expenses. “Everyone had another job,” Erdmann says. “Even
the high school students had another job. The high school students
were working two jobs. For some people, that meant working Saturday
nights as a waitress, but for others, it was much more extensive. For a
lot of people, it meant that they got up every day and went to work in
the afternoon before going in to classes and UPS in the evening.” Every
instructor to whom I spoke confirmed the pressure that the ultralow
wage added to the unreasonable working hours and physical hazards as
a detriment to students’ chances for academic persistence. “That was
when they skipped class,” affirmed another instructor, “when they were
going to another job. I was just amazed how many of them were going
to another job.”
UPS presents a triple threat to students’ prospects for academic per-
sistence: sleep deprivation and family-unfriendly scheduling; ultralow
compensation, resulting in secondary and tertiary part-time employ-
ment; and a high injury rate. Student employees report being pressured
to skip class. Especially at the end of the fall term, the night sorts can
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run four or five hours beyond the anticipated 4:00 am completion:
“Each time I said I was unwilling to miss class for an extended sort, the
supe would tell me to ‘think long and hard about my priorities,’” re-
ports one student employee. “I got the message.”
UPS refuses to provide standard statistics that would permit evalua-
tion of the impact that this triple threat is actually having on the stu-
dents it employs. None of its partner institutions appears to have re-
sponsibly studied the consequences of the program for its students in
terms of such major measures as persistence to degree, dropout rate,
and so on.
Amazingly, all of the press coverage of the UPS earn and learn pro-
grams in general, and the Louisville Metropolitan College arrangement
in particular, has been positive. In fact, most of the coverage appears to
have been drawn closely from UPS press releases themselves or con-
ducted with students selected for their success stories. Acknowledging
that the night shift “took some getting used to,” one local newspaper’s
coverage is typical in quoting a student shrugging off the challenges, “I
just schedule my classes for the afternoon” (Howington). Other stories
are more meretricious, suggesting that the UPS jobs keep students from
partying too much. One quotes a UPS supervisor who suggests that col-
lege students “are staying up until dawn anyway” (Karman).
Ironically, UPS has received numerous awards for “corporate citi-
zenship” and was named one of the “best companies for minorities” in
connection with the program. It emphasizes recruitment among Latino
students,andnumerousHispanicorganizationshaveeitherendorsedthe
program or published unedited UPS press releases marketing the pro-
gram to “nontraditional students, such as retirees and moms re-entering
the workforce” (LatinoLA).
“I Dread Work Every Day”
UPS has long pioneered low-cost benefitless employment, abetted by the
Teamsters themselves, who under Jimmy Hoffa Sr. signed one of the
first contracts in American industry to permit the regular use of part-
time employees in 1962. This second tier of employment was massively
expanded after the Teamsters agreed to 1982 protocols that raised the
wages of full-time workers while freezing those of part-timers. In that
year, part-time UPS employees started at $8 an hour, the equivalent in
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2007 of about $17 per hour ($34,000 a year). Similarly, in 1982, part-
time employees averaged about $10 per hour, the equivalent in 2007 of
$22 per hour ($44,000 a year).
Not incidentally, at the 1982 wages, a UPS part-time worker could
indeed successfully fund a college education. One employee from the
1970s recalls:
At the old full and fair rate prior to the 1982 UPS wage reduction, de-
spite soaring volume and profits, a part-time worker in exchange for
back-breaking work could afford to rent a room, pay tuition, buy food
and clothing, and afford to own and operate a used car. This was a
good deal that was profitable to the student and society, as well as prof-
itable to UPS. I went through six years of college that way and am very
grateful to the Teamsters for the good pay. I find it a national disgrace
that UPS has effectively reduced the pay by nearly 65% adjusted for
inflation since 1982 and destroyed a positive job for over a hundred
thousand workers and for society as well. There are [UPS] part-time
workers living in homeless shelters in Richmond, California, and other
parts of the country. (“saintteamo,” Brown Café weblog, 2003; punctu-
ation regularized)
As with Wal-Mart and other predatory super low-wage employers,
many of UPS’s student workers are homeless. At the Louisville hub, “I
knew people sleeping in their cars,” Erdmann recalled.
After the union’s concession to a radically cheaper second tier of em-
ployment, 80 percent of all new UPS jobs were created in the “perma-
nent part-time” category. While the pay between part-time and full-time
diverged slowly between 1962 and 1982, the differential accelerated
rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s. Serving as a UPS driver is still a coveted
blue-collar position. From the Reagan years to the present, these full-
time Teamsters continued to enjoy raises, job security, due process with
respect to their grievances, and substantial benefits, including a pension.
But over the same period of time, these and other full-time positions be-
came the minority of employees covered by the contract.
In less than fifteen years, permanent part-timers became the majority
of the UPS workforce in the United States. The ratio of permanent part-
timers was particularly pronounced at the Louisville main hub, where a
high-speed, high-pressure night sort was conducted. As the wages of the
part-time majority steadily shrank against inflation, opportunities to
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join the full-time tier all but disappeared. Today, even the company’s
human resources recruiters admit that while full-time positions “still ex-
ist,” it can take “six to seven years or even longer” to get on full-time.
A single-digit percentage of the company’s part-time employees last that
long. Few of those who do persist are actually offered full-time work.
During the long night of Reagan-Bush-Clinton reaction, according to
employees, the company unilaterally abrogated work rules, including
safety limits on package size and weight. Injuries soared to two and a
half times the industry average, in especial disproportion among part-
time employees in the first year.
As jointly bargained by UPS and the Teamsters, the part-time posi-
tions devolved into one of the least desirable forms of work in the coun-
try, with one of the highest turnover rates in history. Featuring poor
wages, limited benefits, a high injury rate, and unreasonable scheduling,
the Teamster-UPS agreement created compensation and working condi-
tions for the part-time majority so abysmal that most rational persons
preferred virtually any other form of employment or even not working
at all.
Most part-timers departed within weeks of being hired. According
to George Poling, director of the Louisville Metropolitan College, the
average term of employment for part-time workers on the night sort
was just eight weeks. At the Louisville facility, 90 percent of part-time
hires quit before serving a year. Across the country in 1996, UPS hired
180,000 part-timers on all shifts, but only 40,000 were still with the
company at the year’s end. In part as a result of steadily accelerating
turnover, UPS agreed in just sixteen days to the most publicized core de-
mand of the 1997Teamsters strike, the creation of 10,000new full-time
jobs out of some of the new part-time positions.
Overlooked during the press coverage of the Teamsters’ apparent vic-
tory was the fact that these new “full-time” positions were paid well be-
low the scale of existing full-timers and would earn just 75 percent of
the rate of regular full-timers by the end of the contract. This intro-
duced a new, lower-wage tier in the ranks of the full-timers. The lower
wages of this group would continue to support the wage increases and
benefits of the union’s powerful minority constituency, the shrinking
core of long-term full-timers. (Readers employed in academic circum-
stances will recognize this strategy as having been pioneered in their
own workplaces, with the institution of nontenurable full-time lecture-
ships as one of the “solutions” that the long-term tenured faculty have
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accepted to management’s expansion of part-time faculty.) It would take
three years of foot-dragging through arbitration and federal court be-
fore UPS delivered even these watered-down full-time jobs.
Despite credulous ballyhoo about the strike as the decade’s exemplar
of labor militance and solidarity between full-timers and part-timers,
the part-time majority of UPS workers benefited little from the Teamster
“victory.” The starting wage for part-timers, which had remained at $8
for fifteen years (since 1982) was raised in the 1997contract a grand to-
tal of 50 cents. Ten years later, the Teamster-negotiated starting wage
for UPS part-time package handlers working between 11:00 pm and
4:00 am remains just $8.50, or exactly one raise in a quarter-century.
This is a loss against inflation of more than half. In 1982, the $8 per
hour starting wage for part-timers was more than twice the minimum
wage (of $3.35), and slightly above the national hourly average wage
(of $7.72). In 2006, the UPS starting wage was about half of the na-
tional average hourly wage of $16.46for nonsupervisory workers. With
the “minimum” wage so low that only half a million Americans earn it,
the $8.50 per hour UPS starting wage in 2006 was equal to or lower
than what most traditionally “minimum wage” occupations actually
earn and lower than the statutory metropolitan living wage established
in many major cities. This isn’t eight or nine bucks an hour for eight
hours a day, 9:00amto 5:00pm. This is eight or nine bucks an hour for
showing up five nights a week at midnight and working three and one-
half to five hours, depending on the flow of packages for physically de-
manding, dangerous, night-shift work at the company’s convenience.
Moreover, there is at least half an hour, often more, of unpaid com-
muting around airport security on either side of the paid three hours.
The commute each way can total as much as an hour, even for students
who live just a mile or two from the facility: “When I was there, you’d
have to be in the parking lot by 11:30 at the latest if you wanted the
shuttle bus to get you to the gate by 11:40, where you’d then wait to
have your ID checked, and then walk through the maze of hub build-
ings for 500 yards before finding your workspace and clocking in,” one
recalled. “The point being if I got parked at 11:45, I’d be late and get
bawled out. The traffic outside UPS leading into the shift is nightmarish,
so you’d really need to leave the house an hour before work to have a
shot at getting to the sort station on time.” With the unpaid commute,
that’s five hours of third-shift time, being paid close to the minimum
wage for just three hours.
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In the past twenty-five years, working conditions at UPS have eroded
even faster than the wage. With the union’s lack of interest in part-time
workers, UPS has increasingly introduced ultrashort shifts, technology-
driven speedup, and managerial surveillance of every aspect of the work
process, including real-time tracking of errors. Employing constant sur-
veillance by a battalion of “part-time supes,” themselves generally stu-
dents, UPS deploys cameras and manned watchtowers throughout the
multilayer sort. “They’re always watching you work from tall perches
that exist nearly everywhere in the plant,” one former student worker
recalls; “the perches are ostensibly ladders to other layers of the sort,
but the consistent presence of management at the stair landings creates
the feeling of almost total surveillance. Even when you can’t see them,
you know they’re in hidden rooms watching you on camera.” Nearly all
student workers are repeatedly tested by “salting” packages with bad
address labels; employees decry the practice as a “particularly nasty”
form of continuous stressing of their work environment.
Several current or former UPS employees have begun weblogs to
chronicle the high-speed, high-stress nature of their employment. One,
writing as “Brown Blood,” explained that he’d begun the weblog for
“the employees of UPS to express their true feelings about their job in
all aspects,” noting, “I must apologize now for any foul language that
may . . . will occur in this community because most of these jobs not
only test the limitations of your physical capacity it also shatters all
anger management.” On the JobVent weblog, UPS workers’ rating of
the workplace were commonly below zero:
Little did I know that I would spend 4 hours a day in a dark, oven hot
dungeon being screamed at by idiotic powertrippers who having given
up believing life has some kind of meaning and now want to make
themselves feel better by humiliating the only people in their lives that
they have any sort of advantage over. All this while you are sweating
liters and giving your back life-long injuries. I couldn’t help but laugh
in disbelief when I received my first paycheck for $120. if you even
think of working at ups, realize that if you don’t want to spend the
next ten years of your life being treated like toiletpaper just to become a
lousy driver then go work for FedEx, the benefits are as good, the pay is
better and you get just a little respect, a friend of mine worked there for
5 days and became a driver. UPS is no less than 7–10 years. Bottom
line: ups sucks a big one!!!!!!!!!I dread work every day.